Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Dakujem

It's pronounced something like "dak-wee-em." It means thank you.

I'm ironing, blogging and watching a Discovery Channel show about saving the planet. Imagine how much I could get done if I had a personal robot assistant. Anyways, these science nerds on the boob tube are trying to use salt crystals to make clouds more reflective, to curb global warming. To me, it sounds like a slamdunk for innovation. I guess the environment might benefit too.

You see friends, unless your name is Jiash Wu, you don't really care about the green movement. Nobody cares about the environment. The faceless mobs care about trends and feeling self-righteous. They care about cool ideas, and amassing wealth. We care about ourselves -I mean they care about themselves.

From what I can gather, economics is about people maximizing their utility. I think it's all fair and well to have opinions and desires for change. I think you can probably get a lot closer to seeing such said hopes realized, if only you are aware of what the crowd is doing. Whether it's to forecast your next move, or insinuate yourself amongst them, you cannot be blind to where the herd is going, or how it is getting there. Paying regard, you'll do infinitely better than just obnoxiously sticking it to the man and refusing to see the world for what it is.

A personal anecdote that comes to mind was the green-ovations that we did for Orientation week 2008 at Queen's. Aside from cutting bottled water use in a giant way (admittedly it still has a long way to go) and other grassroots initiatives we challenged the corporate world to sponsor our green shift. We didn't judge because of how people acted, we offered them an opportunity to contribute to something important, a great cause that they could feel good about (read: we were desperately begging for their copious sums of money). At the end of the day though, to make it work, we had to be aware of what our sponsors wanted and find a way to provide them with that, at benefit to us. We aligned our needs with the goals of our sponsors. I also had the privilege of working with a lot of smart people who worked very hard to complete that project.